From:
Pam Sessoms
Date: 2002-07-17 13:56:43 UTC
Subject: FHL Archives, old and new
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
Message-ID: <Pine.A41.4.21L1.0207170939320.55182-100000@login7.isis.unc.edu>
Everyone,
I wanted to let people know that we are building a fully searchable,
complete FHL messages database. Its content almost complete now, and it
is setup to automatically collect messages daily from the digest, so it
should stay reasonably up-to-date. It includes the old FHL messages from
YahooGroups and also from our current home at SmartGroups.
Here is where anyone can help out. Currently, we are lacking the first
five SmartGroups digests and also SG Digest 16 from a few days
ago. Please, if anyone has any of these, send them to me privately at
pjdutche@email.unc.edu
There is a link to the archive search at our home page:
http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/ferrethealth
The direct address is: http://fhl.sonic-weasel.org/
The old YahooGroups archives search was not very flexible, and it was
quite slow with the amount of data we had accrued. The SmartGroups
message searching is currently down. This new archive is currently the
only way to search the full FHL. My husband, Eric, is a programmer and
wrote some scripts to make all of this work. I'm a reference librarian
and gave him lots of difficult requirements for flexible, powerful
searching, and amazingly enough, I think he pulled it off!
Caveats:
- While we have been testing this now for a couple of weeks, realize you
are using a rather new system, and there are likely still some
bugs. Please report them to me.
- The data is being handled automatically, and there is only so much a
script can do to try to pick out individual messages from large bunches of
text. So, it is not guaranteed to be completely clean. For instance,
in places where people forwarded previous messages within their current
message, the script may not delineate the messages correctly. As I find
"dirty data," I will try to clean it up, but this will be a slow, ongoing
process.
Please use the archive. There is SO MUCH wonderful data in there that FHL
members have supplied over the last year and a half; it has been a treat
to work with it.
Let me know of question, comments, problems,
-Pam S.